International Journal of Prognostics and Health Management, ISSN 2153-2648, 2015 007 Effectiveness of vibration monitoring in the health assessment of induction motor

Abstract

Induction motors are widely used prime movers for rotating machinery in most of the industrial applications. Reliability of the induction motors plays a significant role in reduction in downtime of the machinery. Proper diagnostic procedures are to be followed to assess the condition of the motor. Based on the literature, it is found that the vibration analysis is mostly used for diagnosis of rotating systems. However, industrial experiences reveal that potential motor failures have been observed very frequently even with proper vibration based condition monitoring. Therefore, this paper focuses on further investigations of whether the vibration monitoring stand alone can properly diagnose the presence of faults such as eccentricity in an induction motor or any other alternative technique should be employed in addition to the vibration monitoring for better diagnosis. In this paper, experimental investigations have been carried out to monitor the changes in the vibration and current spectrum of an eccentric motor in its decoupled and coupled state with a healthy rotor system.

Keywords

• condition monitoring
• vibration analysis
• eccentricity
• mcsa
• hierarchical clustering